Sack up and put your own answer out there. What do *you* think we ought to be taking from the top 1% of the earners?

Follow-up question: Are *YOU* one of the top 1%’ers?

- Zhirem

How much do you think you can take from the top 1% of earners salary, before you see loss of production or receipts? Certainly a 10% rate would have little effect on production and at 90% all talent would stop working. What is your gut? With all considerations factored in, what do you think is the optimal %?

(Note: The same year we passed the 16th amendment (income tax), our last $50 gold certificate no longer read,” Payable to the Bearer on Demand.” In my youth, I wanted that cert tattooed on my back in life size.)

Our taxes have backed the currency ever since then.

Meanwhile, the largest shareholder in a number of evil banks, evil corporations, evil hedge funds, is often a group like CALPERS, or some other evil pension fund where evil people have willfully put their evil money. So when you and I are rooting for no bailout, we are also rooting as well for those middle class folk to take a beating.

Rick, let me try and say this so you get where I’m coming from:

“Democrats” are responsible for crafting the concept of “vote yourself rich” – also called positive rights. Their leaders are almost always counting on the premise that if they are the one who riles up the “poor” they will gain for themselves in the process. Whether they actually care about the poor is a point of debate., but for sure, to buy votes, they need income tax.

“Republicans” lost the income tax battle for 66+ years. From 1913-1980 Democrats kept taking more money and buying more stuff for their votes, along the way causing the great depression. In ‘80, the rich fought back with a new strategy that basically ended the game. Massive Deficits.

In the long view, that’s the state of things. Don’t blame me. There is no way to make “vote yourself rich” work forever. There is a limit to how much you can take, so there is a limit to how much you can give.

Now, as an avid watcher of politics, on the day to day wire, I look for incremental news / ideas that seem slightly better than what we are probably going to do. I try and see the real choices.

The ones above seemed worthy of attention. That doesn’t mean, I don’t “stand against bail outs… for political / philosophical reasons.” I am disappointed. I also figure bail outs are inevitable… please read what I wrote, stop jumping to conclusions.

Rick, Jon, et al – I’d love for any of you to explain to me, HOW MUCH you expect to be able to take from the top income bracket, from there we can further the debate.

Then, let’s discuss the total $ you think we can extract from the populace, before productivity goes down.

Once we figure out how much we can take, we can figure out how much we can give.

Let’s get down to brass tacks, how much for the ape?

But since I figure bail outs are inevitable, I think I prefer them this way. In the same way, I was happy to see a new datapoint, JPMorgan saw $15B gains.”

But the JPMorgan-Bear deal eliminates the prospect of the mortgage crisis’s taking down any other institutions, because JPMorgan went up the equivalent of $15 billion right after it pants’d the Fed and Treasury. They are calling Dimon “Jamie Potter Dimon,” after the Lionel Barrymore character who tried to buy the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan for 50 cents on the dollar when that moron Uncle Billy left the deposits at Potter’s bank. Except in this version, to mix movie metaphors, Potter gets Bear for pennies on the dollar, give or take a few cents when the stunned Bear Stearns stockholders haggle, no doubt successfully, for a higher price. We know now, though, that once you can handle a panic for one bank, you will handle a panic for another and another still. I’m sure a host of solvent banks will be banging on Treasury’s door to get the same deal when the next domino falls. There are probably a dozen white knights who want to see their stocks rally when they fleece the Fed to save the market.

http://nymag.com/news/businessfinance/bottomline/45299/

And then really nice suggestion from Forbes (Steve that is…):

“The Treasury Department and the Fed should get together with the SEC, the Comptroller of the Currency and other bank regulators and announce that financial institutions for the next 12 months will no longer write down the value of exotic financial instruments (primarily packages of subprime mortgages). Instead, writedowns will occur only when there have been actual losses on those assets. If a mortgage defaults, a bank will then–and only then–recognize the loss.

It’s preposterous to try to guess what these new instruments are worth in a time of panic. Such assets are being marked down to increasingly arbitrary low levels. But when a bank books such a loss, it must replenish depleted capital, even though cash flows for most financial firms are still positive. Worse, when forced by panicky regulators and lawsuit-fearing accountants to write down the value of these securities, institutions will dump assets in a market where there are temporarily few or no buyers. The result is a spiraling disaster. So let’s have a time-out on markdowns until we actually have real experience in what kind of losses are actually going to occur.”

http://www.forbes.com/home/columnists/forbes/2008/0407/015.html